Every year, Twitter and Google are quite literally plagued by tweets and search queries about the newest disease or iteration of it. Everyone remembers the media takeover after cases of Ebola virus were found in the US circa 2014. Features like Google Trends help track searches surrounding these outbreaks, and Twitter provides insight into how prevalent concern is within a population with its trending #hashtags. Exploring how advantageous these readily accessible programs can be to not only inform the population about potential risks, but actually track incidences of disease, could make significant use out of existing platforms that people use regardless of age.
Through my project, I hope to investigate the potential (and existing) influences of disease outbreak on searches across various social platforms using programs like Google Trends to explore different population response. Furthermore, questions about how this data could be used or why it might be dangerous would be considered.